


Mythos in Action

by AshVee



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Character Death - Tony Stark, Gen, Poison, Post-Fix-It, Self-Sacrifice, What-Fix-It?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-10-22 20:41:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17669717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshVee/pseuds/AshVee
Summary: The human-contingent of the Avengers learn that sometimes things cannot be fixed in the worst of ways.





	Mythos in Action

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know what this is anymore. Lemme know your thoughts?

Mythos in Action

Four days in, it started to become a reality. The human contingent of the Avengers had been captured, and it didn’t matter now that Natasha, Clint, Sam and Tony hadn’t really been the best of friends in the three months since the cluster fuck that had been Thanos. 

The Avengers — the official Avengers — were shattered for two weeks. Two weeks before the remaining few — Tony, Cap, Ant-Man, Natasha and Barton as it turned out — managed to pull their shit together long enough to work as a team, to reverse the holocaust brought on by the Gauntlet. In those two weeks, those that had survived? They remembered. 

Because it wasn’t just the heros that had died. It had been families, friends, politicians and drug dealers. With so few emergency response options remaining and a power void in the seedier parts of the world, communities, societies, countries fell to looting and chaos. 

The return, brought on by the Avengers, was enough to put the Accords to rest, for a while at least. The reprieve was filled with good press. Steve and Bucky had been on a wounded warrior tour, talking about PTSD and surviving and how the world was different back home. 

Bruce hesitantly gave several talks about handling negative emotions, about the realism of anger and guilt and positive ways to channel that energy. Those that had died, those that had just...ceased to exist, hadn’t really understood why half the population was angry or scared or so guilt ridden that some didn’t leave their homes. 

Thor had only been on Earth two days before he’d disappeared to parts unknown, looking for something Tony wasn’t sure he’d ever find. There was pain in every line of the God of Thunder, pain so deeply rooted that it had become a part of him. The happiness, the ease of him had been replaced by a panther beneath his skin. 

Good press, good PR. Pushing, pushing, pushing and —

_Too high. Too close to the sun, Icarus, and your wings are made of wax._

The Iron Man armor was made of a gold-titanium alloy, and it had a melting point of just over 1600 degrees. He wouldn’t melt, not until he found himself in the sun, and the tensile strength of the armor was nearly 430 megapascals. Bullets were a joke, swords were a joke. 

In the end, though, it was something he hadn’t planned for — should have but hadn’t. The suit used a filtration system when mandatory, but on a battlefield, with little smoke and less risk? The filtration system had been bypassed for power, and Tony had inhaled the gas well past the point of no return before he even realized. 

Barton and Natasha and Sam? Natasha had gone down first, Barton coming to her side moments later, succumbing just as Tony realized there was a problem. He didn’t know how they’d gotten Sam; it didn’t really matter. 

He woke up in a cell, the other members of his squishy teammates right along with him, all in their own separate cells along a circular stone wall. Tony was stripped down to his under suit, the lock picks and tiny circuits, all torn from the seams where they’d been painstakingly sewn. 

Natasha was nearly naked in her bra and panties, and had remained that way until Barton had sacrificed his white t-shirt for her. Sam also was left with nothing other than his boxers, and Tony? He’d have laughed if it wasn’t so damned telling. 

Removed from their weapons, their armor, their wings and their teammates? 

_Mind that ankle, Achilles, for it looks to shatter._

“Just hang tight,” Barton had said that first day. “We’ll figure a way out of this.” He’d looked confident when he’d said it, but Tony had already run the angles, the options. They were exposed, contained, and their captor had to do nothing more than let them rot there. Dehydration wasn’t a pleasant way to die.

Food and water had come though, in too small quantities and only twice a day, brought in by a middle-aged woman in medical scrubs, her grey-speckled hair swept away from her face. Food was offered on a small metal tray, securely latched into the metal bars and removed afterward. Water came in a simple plastic cup which was used for each of them in turn and again, taken away afterward. 

She never spoke, never so much as made a whisper when first Tony had tried to rationalize with her. Natasha threatened. Sam appealed to her humanity. Barton flirted and whispered through the bars in a tone so low Tony couldn’t hear.

Still, she left without words, without so much as looking at any of them. No demands, no requests or chances to find out about the world outside. Four days, and the abdominal pain started — nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. It was Natasha who realized, who watched carefully as their food was brought into the stink of bodily fluids and disease. 

“Arsenic?” she asked, pale and sweating. 

“In the food,” the woman finally spoke, simple and to the point. Natasha still ate the bread and greasy meat offered. It hadn’t killed them already, and starvation was less pretty than dehydration. 

“Someone will come,” Sam said that night, as the lights were turned off. “Cap and Barnes.” 

No one told him that it might not matter, that if they did come, they might find four corpses. Tony just stared at his hands, wondering when the skin changes would start, how much was in the food, and how long it would take for four reasonably fit people to die of arsenic poisoning. 

_Your liver, Prometheus, how the eagle picks at it._

Six days, and Sam had stopped standing up, stopped walking around his cell. Six days and Barton didn’t have anything encouraging to say. Natasha stopped threatening the woman. 

She stopped coming alone. 

“Do you know why you’re here?” The man that came with her was middle aged, wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, with a strong back and stronger eyes. 

“Because you’re psychotic?” 

“Because someone should teach our heroes that the world isn’t perfect,” he said, spitting the words like they hurt him. “Someone should show you how the rest of us survived.” 

“What do you mean?” Natasha asked, soft and soothing, despite the fatigue in every line of her. Despite the anger she’d been spewing for the last six days. 

“Just because you brought them all back doesn’t mean they all came back!” the man roared, turning toward her. “Sure, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes save the day at last, but do you know what it was like to mourn? To grieve for two weeks? And then, then, the world becomes something else, and you lose people that don’t get a second chance.” His tirade faded, became hushed and mournful. “Someone had to show you there aren’t always second chances. Someone had to make sure you didn’t fall apart like you did last time, fail us like you did last time.” 

“So you’re going to teach us?” Barton asked, voice hoarse. “You’re the one that’s going to do what? Poison us here? Leave us to die?” 

“No,” the man said, shaking his head. “No, I’m going to let you go.” 

There was hesitant, hopeful silence in that moment, so sweet and pure that Tony thought he might cry. Except the woman, the distant, unmoving woman, laid four glasses out in front of her, filling them to the brim with water and upending a large vial between them. 

“Poisoning us isn’t letting us go.” Natasha was at the bars, eyes wide, playing up her beauty and the way the filth made her seem smaller, less than what she was. 

“There wouldn’t be a lesson if he let you all go,” she said, lifting the glass to her lips. “It wouldn’t be a sacrifice, for anyone.” 

“Don’t!” Tony shouted, lunging forward. The bars caught him in the chest, stopping him a foot short of the woman. She just smiled at him, warm and open and the opposite of everything she’d been in the last six days. 

The man followed suit, draining the glass in one, long draught. He laid his glass down, kissed the woman on the forehead, and guided her out the door. She went without question, without hesitance, and left them in the small, circular room of cells with two glasses.

“You have options,” the man said, indicating the two glasses. “You can share these last glasses of water between you, take the time and the risk that someone will find you here before you die of thirst and hunger.” 

Tony saw it coming, saw it from the first time the man spoke. This wasn’t an execution, not really. This was proving that something could be taken away from even the Avengers. He swallowed against the dryness in his throat. 

“Or?” he asked. 

The man met his gaze steadily, picked up both glasses, and offered them to Tony through the bars. The fingers did not tremble, did not so much as waver just within Tony’s reach. The others had gone silent, still as ghosts and twice as aware of the others in the room. 

“Or, Mr. Stark, you play the hero one last time. You do remember how that’s done, don’t you?” 

“I kill myself twice as quick, and the rest of them rot in here,” he said, mind running the odds. The man hadn’t lied to them, not once. He seemed the bone deep type of weary that came with brutal honesty, laced with the peace of final decision, of finite suffering. 

“There’s always a chance the Avengers will find you in time, that any effects of the poison would be reversed and you would not learn your lesson. There is that chance, small as it may be. You’ll remember this way, too. You’ll all remember, except whoever drinks both of these glasses. They get to forget.” 

Tony’s hands were lightning quick, taking both glasses before one of the others could open their mouths, ruin their chance or worse — take the choice away. 

“You’ll release them?” Tony asked, just to be sure. 

“You have my word,” the man said. 

That was enough, and the water was sweet as life on his tongue. 

_Oh, Antigone fair, why would you let them bury you alive?_


End file.
